Dirty realism at its most mawkish.
A disabled laborer at the edge of despair learns to find himself.
Tom, the hero of this cloying novel by the veteran Dubus, has lost just about everything. A fall from a roof while on the job led to a painkiller addiction, a foreclosed house, a failed marriage, and an estranged son. Living in subsidized housing in northeast Massachusetts, he’s shaken the painkillers but keeps plenty of vodka handy; his neighbors are loud, sometimes violent products (and creators) of broken homes. He wants to get his car out of hock to visit his son on his 20th birthday, but after his last valuable possessions—his tools—are stolen, he’s financially ruined. Early on, a sunken and understandably vengeful Tom (last name: Lowe) ropes his neighbors into driving his creaky body to the home of the agent who trapped him in a disastrous subprime loan; there, he plans to steal his trash, which he hopes contains blank credit-company checks he can fraudulently cash. This goes poorly, so Tom hits on another idea: What if he just approached the world with a spirit of love and forgiveness? Soon, doors creak open for this “broken-boned dog": Needed car rides are proffered, moral support is delivered, and he appreciates every small favor as a miracle of human generosity. Dubus remains a keen observer of the working class, but this cast of hard-luck types serves a sentimental yarn that unsubtly elevates Tom to the level of a Christ figure. (Asked what he once did for a living, he replies “carpenter.”) Maybe Dubus aspired to infuse working-class fiction with a rare optimistic vibe; perhaps he wished to deliver a Dickensian parable on the virtues of generosity to a hardhearted America. Regardless, this ode to the myth of bootstrapping is unpersuasive.
Dirty realism at its most mawkish.Pub Date: June 6, 2023
ISBN: 9781324000464
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
Hokey plot, good fun.
A business executive becomes an unjustly wanted man.
Walter Nash attends his estranged father Tiberius’ funeral, where Ty’s Army buddy, Shock, rips into him for not being the kind of man the Vietnam vet Ty was. Instead, Nash is the successful head of acquisitions for Sybaritic Investments, where he earns a handsome paycheck that supports his wife, Judith, and his teenage daughter, Maggie. An FBI agent approaches Nash after the funeral and asks him to be a mole in his company, because the feds consider chief executive Rhett Temple “a criminal consorting with some very dangerous people.” It’s “a chance to be a hero,” the agent says, while admitting that Nash’s personal and financial risks are immense. Indeed, readers soon find Temple and a cohort standing over a fresh corpse and wondering what to do with it. Temple is not an especially talented executive, and he frets that his hated father, the chairman of the board, will eventually replace him with Nash. (Father-son relationships are not glorified in this tale.) Temple is cartoonishly rotten. He answers to a mysterious woman in Asia, whom he rightly fears. He kills. He beds various women including Judith, whom he tries to turn against Nash. The story’s dramatic turn follows Maggie’s kidnapping, where Nash is wrongly accused. Believing Nash’s innocence, Shock helps him change completely with intense exercise, bulking up and tattooing his body, and learning how to fight and kill. Eventually he looks nothing like the dweeb who’d once taken up tennis instead of football, much to Ty’s undying disgust. Finding the victim and the kidnappers becomes his sole mission. As a child watching his father hunt, Nash could never have killed a living thing. But with his old life over—now he will kill, and he will take any risks necessary. His transformation is implausible, though at least he’s not green like the Incredible Hulk. Loose ends abound by the end as he ignores a plea to “not get on that damn plane,” so a sequel is a necessity.
Hokey plot, good fun.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781538757987
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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